On Media

Candy Crowley: 'I'm going to react' at debate

The town hall debate is the one presidential face-off in which the audience gets to ask the questions.

But don’t tell that to moderator Candy Crowley.

Like any journalist worthy of the assignment, Crowley concedes that the debate on Tuesday night isn’t about her, but she just as eagerly acknowledges her role in it.

“I understand that I’m there. I’m not a fly on the wall,” she told POLITICO recently. “We don’t want the candidates to spout talking points. That doesn’t help voters … I’m going to react organically to what’s happening.”

In a move that has unnerved both campaigns, Crowley, the host of CNN’s “State of the Union,” is indicating she intends to play an active role in a debate meant to be dictated by an audience of independent voters.

“Once the table is kind of set by the town hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about x, y, z?’,” Crowley told CNN earlier this month.

These remarks and others have upset both campaigns, according to a new report by Time magazine’s Mark Halperin and confirmed by POLITICO. “In a rare example of political unity,” Halperin reports, “both the Romney and the Obama campaigns have expressed concern to the Commission on Presidential Debates about how the moderator of the Tuesday town hall has publicly described her role.”

Per the Commission, the questions asked at Tuesday’s debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., are to be determined by an audience of undecided voters. Crowley’s role, according to the contract signed by both campaigns, is limited to “managing” the discussion. She is not supposed to “rephrase the question or open a new topic”, “ask follow-up questions,” “or otherwise intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period.”

Rules be damned: Crowley has given every indication that she intends to assert herself in the debate.

In another interview, on Oct. 11, Crowley told CNN, “The nice thing will be, if the town hall person asks about apples, and they answer oranges, I get to say, ‘Wait a second, the question was about apples — let’s talk about that.”

Crowley’s aggressive approach is not without precedent. During 2008’s town hall debate, NBC’s Tom Brokaw reworded many of the questions from the audience, and was criticized for it.

But Crowley enters this year’s town hall debate in a unique position. For one, she follows in the footsteps of ABC’s Martha Raddatz, the moderator of last week’s vice presidential debate, who exhibited control and authority where her own predecessor, PBS’s Jim Lehrer, exhibited powerlessness and laxity. In the shadow of Raddatz, Crowley will be expected to exert a similar command of the conversation.

Crowley is also the first woman to moderate a presidential debate in 20 years, and the second in presidential debate history. She says it doesn’t matter — “My first reaction was not that I’m a woman, because that’s always been a part of me,” she told POLITICO in an interview last week — but the honor comes with inevitable responsibility. Voters will be looking to Crowley to insert a female perspective into the conversation.